Balloons eBook

“Of course, we know all about Boston, Mrs. Everill,”
her partner was saying, “it produces beans and
Cabots and blue-stockings—­and brides,”
he added, smiling.

Tony and Vivian were still sitting on their sofa.
As she passed, she heard Vivian laugh, “Do you
remember?”

The evening seemed to Lucy interminable. Tony
was very good. He did his duty very nobly, dancing
with every one, even his wife.

At half-past one they went home.

“How charming Lady Dynevor is,” Lucy murmured.

“Charming?” Tony looked puzzled.
“Vivian?”

It obviously seemed to him an almost grotesquely irrelevant,
inadequate word. And then, feeling that something
was expected of him, “She is a wonderful woman,
loyal, faithful, a real friend.”

“She is very pretty,” Lucy said.

“Pretty, is she? I hadn’t noticed
it.” Again he seemed puzzled, as if it
were really too difficult to connect up these absurd
adjectives with Vivian. Then an idea occurred
to him.

“You’re not jealous, sweetheart,
are you?”

“No,” she lied.

“Vivian is—­well, Vivian,” he
explained, making matters worse. And Lucy knew
that if she had said “beautiful, fascinating,
majestic,” if she had used all the superlatives
in the world, they would have seemed to him equally
irrelevant and inadequate. But Tony was very much
in love with his wife and she knew it and soon, in
his tender, whimsical, loving, teasing way, he had
made her perfectly happy again.

She was standing in front of her dressing-table, her
cendre hair—­shadows shot with sunlight—­falling
like a waterfall over her shoulders. With one
hand she was combing it, with the other she fingered
a bundle of snapshots taken on their honeymoon—­lovely
snapshots, full of sunshine and queer, characteristic
positions and expressions. They might, she thought,
have been taken by a loving detective.

Tony came in.

“Do you remember,” she said—­and
then, suddenly, with a wave of misery, she realised
it. The phrase did not belong to her.

V

THE MARTYR

[To H.G. WELLS]

I, myself, have always liked Delancey Woburn.
To begin with, there is something so endearing about
the way he displays his defects, never hiding them
or tidying them away or covering them up. There
they are for all the world to see, a reassuring shop
window full of frank shortcomings. Besides, I
never can resist triumphant vitality. Delancey
is overflowing with joie de vivre, with curiosity,
with a certainty of imminent adventure. If you
say to him, “I saw a policeman,” his face
lights up and so it would if you said “I saw
a dog,” or a cat, or a donkey-cart. To
him policemen and dogs and cats and donkey-carts are
always just about to do something dramatic or absurd
or unexpected. Nor is he discouraged by unfailing
regularity in their behaviour. Faith is “the
evidence of things not seen.”